![]() With a recommendation like that, several of us got Dead Until Dark, and I read it myself last week. “By the way, the vampire’s name is Bill – not Armand or Lestat, as Sookie herself notes in a hilarious bit when she meets her vampire.” ![]() Until the vampire of her dreams walks into her life – and one of her coworkers checks out….Maybe having a vampire for a boyfriend isn’t such a bright idea.” “Sookie Stackhouse is just a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. I thought it was funnier then Blake, and not as gory, but definitely in the same category. It’s Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris. ![]() If I get some time I’m going to do a DIK Review of it, but even if I don’t I wanted to let all of you know. ![]() “I just read a book this weekend that all you Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter fans would probably love. Earlier this month AAR Reviewer Jane Jorgenson sent this message to her AAR colleagues: ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() A ham in a remote location may be able to relay emergency information through another wilderness ham who has better access to a repeater. ![]() The Wilderness protocol (see page 101, August 1995 QST) calls for hams in the wilderness to announce their presence on, and to monitor, the national calling frequencies for five minutes beginning at the top of the hour, every three hours from 7 AM to 7 PM while in the back country. The Wilderness Protocol is now included in both the ARRL ARES Field Resources Manual and the ARES Emergency Resources Manual. The Wilderness Protocol recommends that those stations able to do so should monitor the primary (and secondary, if possible) frequency every three hours starting at 7 AM, local time, for 5 minutes starting at the top of every hour, or even continuously. A single ship, aircraft, spacecraft, or group of them may also maintain radio silence. The term "radio station" may include anything capable of transmitting a radio signal. In telecommunications, radio silence or Emissions Control ( EMCON) is a status in which all fixed or mobile radio stations in an area are asked to stop transmitting for safety or security reasons. ![]() ![]() While these self sustaining communities dotted the wilderness and countryside, the new residents did not always find welcoming committees among their neighbors. Winks writes vivid accounts of the fugitive communities in the Ontario region such as Dresden, Puce, and Elgin and the numerous other small villages. Shortly thereafter Canada became a safe haven for refugees from American slavery. Slavery ended in Canada in part as a result of the works of Lord Simcoe. ![]() Many of these servants found their new homes in Nova Scotia especially in the Halifax area known as Africville. ![]() The first great migration followed our American Revolution when Loyalists fled to the northern colony with their servants. Winks’ history spans over 350 years of the rich history of these African Canadians. Slavery continued in New France beyond the Conquest. Although Africans first visited the coastal region of Canada during early exploration, the first slavery in New France occurred in 1628. In celebration of this, I call attention to the vital and quintessential work on African Canadian history by Robin Winks. Once again February rolls around and thus Black History Month. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Related: Discovery's 10-C First Contact Struggles With New & Classic Star Trek Lieutenant Uhura is often described as one of the most influential characters in the series, and now that continues with Star Trek: Discovery's most recent cameo appearance. There is a direct correlation between Roddenberry's vision for Star Trek and Stacey Abrams' political career, despite the half-century between them. that her performance as an intelligent Black woman in a position of power was critical to the civil rights movement. Nichelle Nichols was cast in the role of Lieutenant Uhura, and she would soon be told by Dr. Roddenberry, who first promoted the original message of Star Trek as a " Wagon Train to the stars," was always very clear about his desire to provide viewers with a peaceful, equitable, and exploration-driven future. He pushed for diverse casting, including the hiring of a Black actress to play one of the bridge crew. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() the story was very confusing and the spelling was horrible, since Lucas had never learned proper spelling or punctuation. My original 14-page treatment didn’t bear much relationship to the final production, though.įrom a site on the development of Star Wars: I had been making notes, doing research over the years, but it wasn’t until I finished American Graffiti in ’73 that I actually started writing it. When I made the deal, I had to give it a name. In Lucas' own words in an article from Mediascene Prevue #42, 1980: He eventually produced at least 6 versions of the script (first/rough draft, second draft, third draft, then 3 different versions of the fourth draft), and he had lots of help during the revision process. ![]() Lucas' first draft was a mess: the story was confusing, far too long, and incredibly boring the characters were terrible and bland the dialogue was leaden and stilted etc. Lucas began by writing a synopsis of the story in early 1973, then started working on a rough draft of a script the next year. At the risk of giving an opinion-based answer, your friend is mostly right. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This offers tantalizing glimpses of talent with a steady hand on mystical material. Great ones do”), and there are evocative tableaus of life in Geshig. Staples, though, can be marvelously funny (“Good mothers don’t give their sons marijuana. The novel’s two strands, the desultory mystery and the romance, never fully gel, and neither generates quite enough suspense or emotional resonance. Marion, the main narrator of Staples first book. A visit to a sweat lodge ceremony with a wonderfully rendered medicine man leads to the discovery that spirits are real, not a “stupid” superstition, and Kayden’s ghost follows Marion through an investigation of his own family’s history of violence and restless spirits. A young gay man reckons with love, tribal lore, and a decades-old murder in this rangy debut novel. Marion seeks to find out what the manidoo wants and why it has visited him in particular. While pursuing this fraught relationship, Marion encounters an otherworldly dog-a manidoo, or revenant-and follows him to the grave of Kayden Kelliher, a teenager murdered by another boy years earlier. ![]() Marion Lafournier is a 26-year-old gay Ojibwe man, cynical and wry, who feels stuck in Geshig, a small reservation town in Minnesota that “crushes any form of ambition.” He begins a clandestine affair with former prom king Shannon Harstad, who struggles to square his secret homosexuality with his conception of masculinity. In this promising but slack debut, Staples depicts a Native American community with a haunted past and a bleak future. ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a good device for maintaining tension. Sound weird? Well, Simmons manages his stories pretty well, alternating between the three plots mainly by chapter. In the third one, these robots (with some living parts) from Jupiter are flying out to Mars (where The Iliad is happening) and talking about Western literature (Shakespeare and Proust, mainly). In the second one, people are on Earth, but their lives are pretty unrecognisable for a twenty-first century human. In the first one, Simmons essentially decides to retell Homer’s The Iliad in a sci-fi setting. ![]() The plot is complicated, involving three main threads. That being said, I was favourably impressed with Ilium. While I occasionally read fantasy (mainly David Eddings), I’ve never enjoyed a science-fiction book. It’s a two-book series, that should probably be published as one extra-large book, since the action continues seamlessly. So, I ended up reading Iluim and Olympos by Dan Simmons as two of my Chunkster Challenges (they come to 1,643 pages-more than War and Peace). ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Lively and approachable, this audiobook is ideal for all those who want to learn how the basic techniques of thinking shape our existence. The large scope of topics covered range from skepticism, the self, mind and body, and freedom to ethics and the arguments surrounding the existence of God. Publication history Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy was first published by Oxford. He also defends the value and importance of philosophy. It teaches you how to think and gives you insight questions to ponder. (April 2020) Blackburn covers subjects such as epistemology, philosophy of the mind, free will, and philosophy of religion, discussing them on an introductory level. Each chapter explains a major issue, and gives the listener a self-contained guide through the problems that philosophers have studied. The book delves straight into what you need to be thinking about and how to organise your brain and why studying philosophy is useful and transferable to so many areas of life. ![]() Simon Blackburn begins by putting forward a convincing case for the study of philosophy and goes on to give the listener a sense of how the great historical figures such as Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein have approached its central themes. Simon Blackburn, author of the best-selling Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, begins by making a convincing case for the relevance of philosophy and goes on to. Think sets out to explain what they are and why they are important. It is for anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them. This is an audiobook about the big questions in life: knowledge, consciousness, fate, God, truth, goodness, justice. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() So, I decide to tell the story from the point of view of the platonic male friend and make him the main character instead of the girl. Out of frustration, I felt a story developing, and started writing but after reading the first draft, an entire novel on molestation was too heavy. ![]() By now, I’m beside myself and so angry that the system didn’t protect this girl and sent her back to her abuser. But she told my son she was vilified by the family for "starting trouble". So, I’m feeling pretty good about myself for having done my Christian duty by helping this young girl but three weeks later she’s back at school and back at home with her abuser and I’m like “What the…just happened?” I’ll never know why she was sent back to that house. I felt awful for the girl, so I write an anonymous letter to the school explaining the situation and to my surprise she gets taken out of the school and sent to live with relatives in another state. One day my 13 year old son (he’s now 16 and super cute) came home from school and tells me about a female friend who shared with him that she was being molested by her stepfather and her mother called her a liar and didn’t believe her. ![]() ![]() I started maintaining a praise file, not to get lost in the past glory, but to keep it around for the times when I need the push/lift. The things that we often consider as just messing around is where the magic happens. ![]() The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life, and it's often these side projects that take off. We learn how to write, by copying alphabets too. Copying is all about reverse engineering, and it's like taking apart an electrical toy to see how it works. Plagiarism is showing someone else's work as yours. There is a difference between an artist and a hoarder, an artist selectively collects ideas/thoughts, and a hoarder picks up everything, and they collect indiscriminately.Ĭopying is different from plagiarism. You are only as smart as the content you consume, the people you hang out with, and the workplace you work at. We, humans, are like printers what we take in is the same as what we take out, and that's why we should stop following our dreams, and we should start following the right people. ![]() How my life/behaviour/thoughts/ideas have changed as a result of reading the book. ![]() |